Dr Hamisu Salihu is a Lecturer in Development Economics in the Department of International Development at King's College London. He is a political economist working on industrial policy, structural transformation and innovation policy, with Nigeria as his main empirical focus.

Before joining King's, he was a Research Fellow at the Innovation and Research Caucus (IRC), University of Warwick, funded by the ESRC and Innovate UK. There he led projects that informed UK policy, including a mapping of the innovation and commercialisation infrastructure for robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) and Agri-tech, which fed into Innovate UK's Technology Adoption Hub. He also led a project on the use of AI in evaluation, which the UK Evaluation Society is using to draft guidelines on responsible AI use in the UK.

Hamisu holds a PhD in Economics from SOAS University of London (2023), an MSc with Distinction from the University of Surrey and a BSc from Bayero University Kano, Nigeria.

Research

• Political economy of industrial policy
• Structural transformation in Africa, with a focus on Nigeria
• Political settlements, rents and state-business relations
• Innovation policy and technology adoption

Hamisu's research asks why industrial policy succeeds in some sectors and fails in others within the same country. Working with political settlements theory, theories of technological capabilities, and the rents space framework, he studies how the distribution of power and capabilities among firms, political elites and external actors shapes the allocation of rents and the incentives to invest and learn. His empirical work centres on Nigeria, including a comparison of Dangote's divergent trajectories in cement and crude oil and a study of the rice sector. His work have been published in The Journal of Development Studies and Competition & Change among others.

Teaching

Postgraduate 

• 7YYDN023 The Political Economy of Uneven Development, Dependency and Imperialism